“It has 16 beautiful colors, but you’re never going to see any of them except green because everyone only springs for the monochrome monitor. Including our ad people.”

Toronto says: November 30, 20122:07 pm

@fluffy: That’s because it was really hard to read text on a color monitor. Even on the IBM, having a MDA – or better, a Hercules card – and a CGA in the same box was almost required to develop and test code.

I always found the IBM CGA TTL monitor to be perfectly readable in text mode. The reason I always liked having a CGA+MDA dualhead setup was so I could run the app on one screen and the debugger on the other.

Composite NTSC monitors were trash, though, yeah.

mcubstead says: December 1, 201211:43 am

Compsite monitors, were not worth looking at. I remember most of the color monitors were so round, they seem to look funny. The mono’s wern’t much better, but with the green you could use them all day. I was just out of High School when these came out. I did’nt know then that Dot pitch was the problem with those color monitors. Still Pac Man was just better in color!!

Toronto says: December 2, 20126:13 pm

I’ll admit to running Windows on a mono monitor, but it was the plasma screen of an IBM “luggable.” Probably version 1.x – it was so bad I went back to DOS. (Not that any MS product was my bread and butter back then.)